Wings

Cindy's circle of life post involving a monarch and a mantis encouraged me to get around to this:

Some monarch-eating predator (bird? rodent? mantis?) had taken the entire body of this butterfly and left the wings close together on the garden path.  That evidence itself would suggest a ground based attack rather than the butterfly being snapped out of the air mid-flight.  I gathered up the wings and held them on the expanded metal patio table for awhile; an appreciation.

On or about the same day of discovery of the wings I clipped this Lio strip from the paper:

Sometimes you acquire wings, only to get pinned to a board by someone more powerful.
Sometimes you get taken out of the game altogether.
Sometimes you get to soar wingless and unpinned in the sunlit air with rainbows and sundogs and big puffy clouds and songbirds and kites and songs and arcing arrows and helium balloons that never ever interfere with jet airplanes and zeppelins and hawks and superstars and superheroes and people with helium balloons attached to aluminum lawn chairs and dreamers and comets and all manner of other flying things.

A lot of times you sit on the sidelines watching and chronicling the ups and downs of fellow creatures.  And that's cool.

Not-So-Comical Juxtaposition

Sometimes items in the newspaper position themselves together and make a statement that speaks to me about the way of the world at that point in time. Zeitgeist? Cosmic vibes? Or have I not had enough coffee at the time when I was reading them?

Anyway, here's a clip of three comics that cohabit a few square inches of today's LA Times that seemed to say something about something.

Spidey-graphs

The green lynx spiders are growing but still tiny as they hunt among the shrub tops. On a recent early morning I was lucky to find this tiny one with its syrphid fly prey. The same spider is seen the next morning in profile underneath the same alyogyne leaf.











The deeply textured leaves of salvia madrensis are always home to many of these small spiders, probably because lots of buggies like to chew on them and the flowers, and the plants grow tall up where the spideys like to be. This tiny one is barely larger than a bump on the leaf.













After I took these photos, I really had a laugh at this Lio strip: